His light. His hope. His wife. His love.
In one fantasy, Magnus married her again, not in a crumbling ruin of a temple and under duress, but in a meadow filled with beautiful flowering trees and lush green grass.
Beautiful flowering trees and lush green grass? he thought. What irrelevant nonsense fills my mind?
He much preferred the ice and snow of Limeros.
Didn’t he?
Magnus allowed himself to remember the princess’s rare smiles, her joyful laugh, and, mostly amusingly, the sharp way she’d look at him when he constantly said something to annoy her.
He thought about her hair—always a distraction to him when she wore it down, long golden waves over her shoulders and down to her waist. He remembered the silky brush of it during their wedding tour when he’d kissed her, which had happened only because of the cheering crowd’s demands—a kiss he’d despised only because he’d liked it so much.
Their next kiss in Lady Sophia’s Limerian villa had struck like a bolt of lightning. It had frightened him, although he’d never admit such a thing out loud. It was the moment he knew that, if he let her, this girl would destroy him.
And then, when he’d found her in that small cottage in the center of a snowstorm, after he’d thought her dead and gone . . . and he’d realized how much she meant to him.
That kiss hadn’t ended nearly as swiftly as the others.
That kiss had marked the end of the life he’d known before and the beginning of another.
When he learned she was cursed like her mother by a vengeful witch, to die in childbirth, his selfish desires for her had ground to an abrupt halt. He would not risk her life for any reason. And together they would find a way to break this hateful curse.
But Lord Kurtis had been yet another curse cast upon them.
Magnus remembered the threats Kurtis had whispered to him while chained up and unable to tear the former kingsliege apart. Threats of what he would do to Cleo when Magnus couldn’t protect her.
Dark, nightmarish atrocities that Magnus wouldn’t wish upon his worst enemy.
Panic swelled within him as these thoughts brought him back to stark reality. His heart pounded, and he strained to break free of this small, stifling prison deep underground.
“I’m here!” he yelled. “I’m down here!”
He yelled it over and over till his throat felt as if he’d swallowed a dozen knives, but nothing happened. No one came for him.
After cursing the goddess he’d long since stopped believing in, he began to bargain with her.
“Delay my death, Valoria,” he growled. “Let me out of here, and let me kill Kurtis before he harms her. Then you can take my life any way you wish to.”
But, just like his yells for help, his prayers went unanswered.
“Damn you!” He slammed his fist against the top of the coffin so hard that a splinter of wood wedged into his skin.
He let out a roar, one filled with pain and frustration and fear.
He’d never felt so helpless. So useless. So incredibly—
Wait . . .
He frowned as he ripped the splinter out of his skin with his teeth.
“My arm,” he whispered in the darkness. “What’s wrong with my arm?”
Actually, it wasn’t what was wrong with it. It was what was right with it.
His arm—both of his arms—had been broken at Kurtis’s command. He hadn’t been able to move more than a little without immediate, crushing pain.
He fisted his right hand, then moved his wrist and arm.
There was no pain.
Impossible.
He tried again to move his left arm with the same result. And his leg—the sound of the crack it made when broken and the mind-numbing pain that followed was still far too fresh in his mind.
He wiggled his toes inside his boot.
No pain.
A drop of mud squeezed between the narrow slats of the coffin and splashed into his eye. He winced and wiped it away.
The thunder rolled high above him. The sound had been a constant since he’d been buried. If he concentrated, he could hear rain pounding down upon his grave and soaking into the earth covering his coffin.
He pressed both of his hands flat against the wooden barrier above him.
“What am I thinking?” he mused. “That my bones somehow magically healed? I don’t have earth magic like Lucia does. I’m hallucinating.”
Or was he?
After all, there was a way to keep one alive and well long after they were supposed to die. He’d learned about it only recently.
Magnus frowned at the thought. “Impossible. He wouldn’t have given it to me.”
Still, he began to search himself with arms that now worked and hands that were previously useless to him. He slid his palms down his sides, over his chest, feeling the suffocating press of wood on either side of him.
He froze as he felt something small and hard in the pocket of his shirt, something he hadn’t noticed until this very moment.
Fingers trembling, he drew out the object.
He couldn’t see it in the complete darkness, but he could feel its familiar shape.
A ring. But not just any ring.
The bloodstone.
Magnus slid the ring onto the middle finger of his left hand, gasping as an immediate chill spread through his entire body.
“Father, what have you done?” he whispered.
Another drop of mud oozed onto his face, stunning him further.
Magnus pressed his hands against the wooden slats above him that were damp from the rain that had soaked into the earth. His heart lurched at the thought. Damp wood could give easier than dry wood, if he tried hard enough.
“No one is coming for you,” he imagined Kurtis’s reedy voice mocking him. “There’s no magic that’ll keep you alive forever.”
“That’s what you think,” Magnus muttered.
Along with the chill he’d felt from the bloodstone’s magic against his fingertips, strength also filled him again.
He made a tight fist and punched upward, succeeding only in slicing his hand with more splinters from the wet wood. He grimaced, made another fist, and then punched again.
This would take time.
He imagined that the barrier above him was Kurtis Cirillo’s face.
“Beetles,” Magnus gritted out as he punched at the wood again. “I think I’ll kill you with hungry, flesh-eating beetles.”
CHAPTER 5
AMARA
PAELSIA
Amara clutched the message that had arrived from Kraeshia in her fist as she limped into the royal compound’s prison for the second time in as many days.
Carlos had remained a strong yet silent presence, and she appreciated her guard more than she’d say aloud. Of all the men that currently surrounded her, she trusted him the most. And trust, given recent events, was in extremely limited supply.
She hated this prison. Hated the dank, musty odor it had, as if the scent from decades of prisoners had permanently soaked into the stone walls.